Format a 512e drive to 4096 on Linux

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they/them edited

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Thanks for all the advice! Hereā€™s some funny feedback: it was a faulty drive šŸ¤£ give me back my feelings šŸ˜­ obviously Iā€™m sending it back

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I have just received my Seagate 18TB IronWolf Pro HDD and the specs say that the logical sector size is 512 emulated. Moreover, Seagate says that switching to 4096 sector size is as easy as doing a quick format (Windows terminology?). I suppose on Linux this simply means creating a filesystem with that block size? For instance mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 /dev/device or - in my specific case - cryptsetup luksFormat --sector-size=4096 and then creating a file system?

What confuses me is the Arch Wiki article on advanced format that has instructions on how to use hdparm to tell the firmware to use a certain sector size.

Do I need to do the hdparm thing, which seemingly conflicts with the Seagate instructions?

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they/them OP

feedback
Thanks for all the advice! Hereā€™s some funny feedback: it was a faulty drive šŸ¤£ give me back my feelings šŸ˜­ obviously Iā€™m sending it back

dhWvundoMJKYgdc.jpg

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I donā€™t really have a good answer for you. Is the concern IO throughput? Wear leveling? Space efficiency? If this is a new drive being stuffed into an existing system, I recommend doing a couple of permutations and measuring.

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they/them OP

Since I may want to clone disks:

Disk cloning between drives with different logical sector sizes is not advised. Moving to a drive with a smaller logical sector size (e.g. from 4096 bytes to 512 bytes) will require recreating the partition table since partition boundaries are specified in sector numbers. Moving to a drive with a larger logical sector size (e.g. from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes) may not be possible at all if a file systemā€™s block size is less than target driveā€™s logical sector size or is not divisible by it.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Disk_cloning

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Ahh yeah, align the sector sizes, especially if you want to boot the clones. Reading the seagate drive page, it seems like it tells you explicitly how to set the sector size 1 . Windows probably does this implicitly when doing a format. I am fairly confident none of the luks or mkfs tooling will touch hard drive firmware settings. So yes, you definitely want to tweak the mode with hdparm.

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they/them OP

Thanks! I did notice that little box of text, but itā€™s ā€œunfairā€ they assume people know ATA commands or whatever they areā€¦ :( I wouldā€™ve appreciated something moreā€¦ Abstract šŸ¤£

Anyway, thanks for the help!šŸ˜Š

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